Graphic organizer Grade 7 Health & Consumer Science
Three Ways to Check the Boone Household's Water
A grade 7 compare-three-ways graphic organizer on at-home test strips, a certified lab test, and the utility's annual water quality report.
Objectives
- Students will compare three ways to check home water across what each tells you, its cost, and when to use it.
- Students will explain why a utility report does not replace testing a home's own tap.
Vocabulary
- Contaminant
- A contaminant is anything in water that should not be there, whether it is a germ, a chemical, or too much of a natural mineral, that could make the water unsafe or unpleasant to use. Treatment plants are built specifically to find and remove contaminants before water reaches the tap.
Also: test strip, certified lab, water quality report
Teacher overview
A family that wants to know whether its water is safe has three common options, and each answers a different question. This is a compare-and-contrast organizer: the fictional Boone household lists what each method tells you, what it costs, and when to use it. Filling the table side by side makes the trade-offs visible, so a family can match the right tool to its question instead of assuming one check covers everything. The bottom-line question draws out a key point, that a utility's report covers the water system as a whole but not the family's own pipes. Use it before or after a home water-safety lesson, either as a note-taking frame during reading or as a review students complete from memory.
Organizer
| Way to check | What it tells you | What it costs | When to use it |
|---|---|---|---|
| At-home test strip kit | |||
| Certified lab test | |||
| Utility's annual water quality report |
Bottom line question: Why might the Boone family still test its own tap even after reading the utility's report?
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Completed Exemplar
| Way to check | What it tells you | What it costs | When to use it |
|---|---|---|---|
| At-home test strip kit | A quick, rough reading of a few things like hardness, chlorine, pH, and sometimes lead. | Low cost. | For a fast first check at home; confirm any worrying reading with a lab. |
| Certified lab test | An accurate level for specific contaminants such as lead, PFAS, or bacteria. | Higher cost, and it takes time. | When you need a result you can trust, such as after a high strip reading or before buying a home. |
| Utility's annual water quality report | The levels the utility measured for regulated contaminants, listed next to their legal limits. | Free; sent once a year. | To see how your whole water system did over the past year. |
Bottom line answer: The utility's report summarizes tests from across the whole water system, not the water at the Boone family's own faucet. Lead and other metals can enter from a home's own pipes, so testing the family's tap is the only way to know what actually comes out of it.
Differentiation
Support
Pre-fill the "What it tells you" column and have students complete only the cost and timing columns. Provide a short word bank ("free," "low cost," "higher cost," "once a year") to place in the correct cells.
Extension
Ask students to add a fourth row for a whole-house filter check and describe what it would tell the family, then explain how it differs from the three methods already listed.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "test strip," "certified lab," and "water quality report" with a picture of each. Allow students to complete the cells with short phrases, and provide a sentence frame for the bottom-line answer: "The family should still test its tap because ___."